


Shovel-Bum

by cofax



Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: AU, Crossover, Gen, Pegasus B
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-12
Updated: 2010-03-12
Packaged: 2017-10-07 22:19:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/69820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cofax/pseuds/cofax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Catherine Langford never found Daniel that day? AU, loosely a <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=pegasus_b">Pegasus B</a> story, an AU of the <a href="http://salieri.bonuspoints.net/Pegasusb/pilot.html">Pegasus B pilot</a>.   Posted September 2005.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shovel-Bum

**1995**

The coffee stand at the conference center makes weak coffee, but Daniel doesn't have it in him to venture out into the downpour outside to get something better. He drapes his coat over his bag and slumps lower into the couch, hoping the potted palm will hide him from any of the other conference attendees. He really isn't in the mood for any more Von Daniken jokes.

In a few minutes, after he's finished his coffee, he'll catch a cab to the bus station and slog back to Denver. Frank and Jeanette will put him up for a month or two, if reluctantly; long enough to get another grant lined up. Maybe.

"Excuse me, Doctor Jackson?" Someone looms over him, and Daniel bobbles his styrofoam cup, spilling half of it on his slacks. Thankfully, it's gone cold.

"Shit!"

"Oh, I'm so sorry--" The shadow disappears for a moment, and comes back with a handful of napkins. "Here, does this help?"

Daniel mops with one hand, straightens his glasses with the other, and glances up into the face of a total stranger. She's in her late forties, a dark-haired woman dressed better than most of the tweedy or scruffy academics at the conference. Instead of a backpack she carries a neat leather briefcase in her hand, big enough to fit a laptop.

"Nancy Jameson," she says. "I'm sorry about the coffee," and she sits down on the couch next to him.

"No, it's okay," Daniel says, and crumbles the wet napkins into a ball. "Um, have we--"

"No, we haven't," she cuts him off. "But I heard some people talking about you in between the last two sessions, and I wanted to catch up with you before you left."

"Why?" he asks bluntly. He suspects there will be no more grants, but that doesn't mean he's really ready for any more public humiliation.

"I'm the head of the archaeology section at PRA's Sacramento office," she says, smiling. "And I just got off the phone with our office manager, and well, I think we could use you."

"I'm sorry," interrupts Daniel. "The what at the who?"

"You haven't heard of PRA?" She raises her brows.

"Should I?"

"We're only the second-largest cultural resources contractor in the western US, Doctor Jackson." When Daniel just stares at her blankly, she sighs. "You academics, I swear. We do what you would call 'salvage' archaeology," and she puts her hands up in those little quotation marks. "Government contracts, surveys before timber sales or housing developments, that sort of thing."

"Oh," says Daniel faintly, and wishes he had a cup of coffee to look at. Salvage archaeology is science done for money, not for knowledge, often under a deadline. Daniel knows of a few students from his doctoral program who went into contract archaeology, but it wasn't encouraged as a career path. "And you want me to...?"

"Well, you can come down off your pedestal, Jackson," she replies, a little sharply. "It pays better than the fellowships you've been living on, and it's work worth doing. I heard you were good in the field, and our crew boss broke her ankle last week. But if you're too hung up on the glory of academia--" and with that Jameson cast a eye at Daniel's stained khakis, "--and the purity of science, then tell me now and I won't waste any more of your time."

"Oh." He sits for a moment, staring at the brown patch on his pants.

"Well?" she says, after a pause. Her voice is softer than it was.

He laughs a little and fiddles with his glasses. "Ms. Jameson, I have three hundred and fifty-seven dollars in the bank. My grants have run out and I'm a laughingstock in the academic community."

"So?" She leans forward, close enough that Daniel can see how her eyeliner has smudged during the day.

"So, I like to eat. I accept."

She smiles. "Excellent. I don't think you'll regret it, Doctor Jackson. And you'll still be able to do your research--on your own time, of course."

"Of course. And, um, call me Daniel."

"Then call me Nancy. And now," she stands up and shrugs into her overcoat, "If we move fast enough, I think we can catch the 4 o'clock flight to San Francisco. Unless there's something keeping you here?" She glances down at Daniel's battered suitcases, leaning drunkenly against each other next to the couch.

"Ah, no," he says.

"Fine, then. Then let me grab my bag--I left it at the desk--and we can go."

The mid-afternoon session has just gotten out; Jameson has to push her way through a small crowd to get to the desk. Several dozen people walk by, including someone in a military uniform. Daniel plucks at his damp slacks and wonders what the weather's like in Sacramento. It must be warmer than here.

"Ready?"

"Ready," he says, and follows her out of the hotel into the rain.

 

***

 

**1998**

The phone rings at least eight times before someone picks it up. "Archaeology Department, Sharon speaking."

Daniel drops his pen, and ducks under the desk to scrabble for it. "I'm sorry, I was trying to reach Doctor Rothman." He's short on crew for a project in Cyprus, and Robert always knows the hungriest grad students.

The voice on the other end of the phone is uncertain. "I'm sorry, Doctor Rothman isn't--um, he's no longer with the program."

"What?" Daniel bangs his head on the desk coming back up. "Ow! Sorry, hit my head. Did you say Robert's not there?"

"That's right, sir. If there's anyone else in the department--"

The sun streams in through the eastern window across the desk Daniel's constructed out of cinder blocks and a door from a barn down the road. He's arranged a handful of obsidian arrowheads in a chevron on the blotter, and they throw off shards of rainbows in the morning light.

"No, um, this is Daniel Jackson, I'm an old friend of Robert's. He didn't tell me he was leaving the university. Where did he go? Did he leave a number he could be reached at?"

"Um, hang on." There's a pause, and the phone switches over to some mournful chanting, maybe Athabascan, Daniel isn't sure. Anthropology departments tend to have esoteric hold music. After a few minutes, "Right!" says the cheery young voice on the other end. "Oh, wait, that's weird."

Daniel picks up his pen again. "What?"

"Well, he left a number and a home address, but no work address." She rattles off a number with an area code Daniel doesn't know. He thanks her and hangs up.

Daniel stares at the number for a few moments, perplexed, and pulls out a phone book. It's a Colorado number, but not Boulder or Denver. He shrugs and calls it. It's the work day; of course, no one answers. After six rings he gets a machine, with a singularly uninformative message. "Robert, it's Daniel Jackson. Give me a call, would you? Thanks." He stares out the window at the mountains for a few moments before going back to his to do list. The principal investigator for this project will be on site in less than two weeks, and Daniel has to have everything running by the time Doctor Frederickson arrives. It's his first chance to run a dig this size, and he doesn't want to blow it.

Four days later, Daniel's stuffing the last pair of clean underwear he'll see for three months into his duffle when the phone rings.

"Daniel, it's Robert."

"Robert! What have you been up to?" He leaves the bag unzipped and goes out onto the small porch. From here he can see the small yard around the cabin, and then nothing but trees and sky. When he inherited the lease from PRA's retiring geologist, he'd found it stifling; Daniel had always preferred the desert. But now it's a relaxing change from the dust, the sand, the dry of the work he's been doing for the past five years. He likes the green.

"Ah." Robert's voice is hesitant. Robert was always a little hesitant, a little unsure, even when he was absolutely right; but this is different. "I, um, well I guess you got this number so you know I'm not in Ithaca anymore."

"Uh-huh..." Daniel already put the adirondack chair in the shed for the season, so he sits on the splintering steps, blinking in the sun. "Where'd you go? Colorado someplace, isn't it?"

"Yeah, I'm, um, in Colorado Springs."

Daniel wrinkles his nose. He's been there once or twice, passing through on his way to meet with clients at Fort Carson or Fort Collins; it's not a particularly academic town, and he doesn't know of any cultural resources contractors with offices there. "Really, why? Who are you working for?"

"Well, ah, the military."

"The military! _Why_?" It isn't that Robert is inherently anti-military; he's a classicist, after all, and classicists are sometimes also military historians. It's just that he's a classicist, and Daniel can't imagine a reason why--- "Wait a minute. Are they sending you to the Middle East?"

"No! Oh, no. I don't go into the field." Robert sounds like he wants to laugh, sounds excited. "I just--"

"Do they have you doing North American work? Seems like a waste of your background."

Robert pauses. "I'm really sorry, Daniel. It's classified and I can't tell you." He sounds truly apologetic, as if he'd like nothing more than to tell Daniel what he's been doing.

"You what? What kind of classified work can there _be_ for a specialist in Greek and Roman pottery? Robert--"

"Oh, god, I shouldn't have said that. Daniel, you gotta promise me, not to say anything. You didn't hear that, I didn't say that, oh god, they might be tapping my phone, I've heard they do that. I gotta go. Take care, we'll talk soon, I promise--"

Robert hangs up. When Daniel calls back, he gets the machine again. Robert doesn't call again.

He shakes his head, finishes packing his duffle, and throws it into the back of the jeep. He's halfway to Cyprus, changing planes in New York, when he remembers a story he heard at a conference last fall, about how Mandy Peters, a specialist in early Norse settlement patterns and cultural traditions, had disappeared into the military as well.

 

_Huh_, he thinks, and makes a note: "Rothman--classics. 1998. Peters--Norse. 1997. ??"

 

***

 

**2001**

When he's in Cairo, Daniel doesn't usually stay in the western hotels: he prefers Egyptian coffee and it's always good to practice his Arabic. But he's been in the field for six weeks and he wants three days of unrestricted showers and clean sheets before he gets on a plane for Paris, and after that, the Orkneys.

So it's not as much of a surprise as it could have been, to see Robert Rothman walk by his table on the porch of the old hotel, where Daniel's working on his second pot of coffee and digging through the backlog of mail. "Robert!" he calls, before he remembers the way Robert stopped returning his messages three years ago.

But Robert doesn't seem to recall dropping Daniel's acquaintance, and smiles broadly as he weaves past a few tables. "Daniel!"

To Daniel's surprise, Robert hugs him; he's additionally surprised to realize that Robert's put on some weight. Instead of a frail, thin-chested scholar, Daniel finds himself hugging shoulders wiry with muscle. Robert's kept the beard but lost his glasses along the way.

Waving at the extra chair, Daniel clears some room at the table and turns over a coffee cup. "You want?"

"God, yes, thanks." Robert looks tired but cheerful, as if he's just come off a long dig. "I've spent a large chunk of the last six months without coffee. Tea, oh god, endless cups of tea, but no coffee."

Daniel raises a brow. "Where were you where there was no coffee?"

Robert smiles easily. "Japan, actually. I mean, they have it, but--" He waves a hand disparagingly and takes an eager sip of his coffee. If he's lying, he's definitely better at it than he used to be. "Hey, so what are you up to now? You still with that consulting group in Sacramento?"

"Off and on. They're good about letting me go during the season. I've spent the last six weeks down outside of Karnak with Finnstein's group." Daniel shrugs, but smiles: it's a large, complex site, and promises a lot of interesting research into changing cultural traditions for the next few years. "What about you? You still with the military, doing whatever it is they have you doing?"

Once upon a time Robert published two or three papers per year: he was like a machine. But for the past three years, there's been nothing. Whatever he's been doing, it's nothing he can talk about. And he doesn't. He shrugs himself, and turns the conversation back to Daniel's own research. Daniel gives up the hunt, reluctantly, and allows Robert to pick his brain about the finds he's been making. There's a lot to talk about, and the morning passes quickly, the table becoming littered with pastry crumbs and sketches of tomb complexes on paper napkins.

They are finally interrupted by a low buzzing. Robert swears and fishes a phone out of his pocket. "Damn," he says as he looks at the display. "Sorry, I have to take this." But he doesn't step away, just presses the button and puts the phone to his ear. It's a satellite-enabled cell, Daniel notices with a little envy.

"Rothman." There's a pause. "Yeah, I talked to him before I--" Another pause, and a slight wince. "No, I can't. I'm sorry, Co--" he cuts off with a quick glance at Daniel. "I'm sorry, but I'm in Egypt. By the time I could get back I wouldn't be much use." He rolls his eyes. "Yes, that would be convenient, however. No, of course, you're--I will. Yes, yes, I'll be on the next flight. I don't know what good it'll--" He stops, takes the phone away from his ear, and stares at it in aggravation. "That man never listens to me."

"Boyfriend?" asks Daniel mildly, just to get a reaction.

Robert nearly chokes, he laughs so hard. He never explains what's so funny, and leaves with many promises to call soon. "And who knows, I may be able to throw some work your way, if you're interested."

But he doesn't. The next time Daniel tries to call Robert, the phone has been disconnected. Several months later there's a short obituary in the SAA newsletter, with a fantastically vague cause of death. Donations to the SPCA are encouraged.

 

***

 

**2003**

The call comes in late on a Thursday night. Daniel shouldn't even be at the office at this hour, but they've got a proposal due on Monday and he'd really rather not spend the weekend working on it. Contracting has its benefits, but short workdays aren't among them.

"PRA," he mumbles into the phone around the cookie he found in the break room, leftover from Nancy's birthday party that afternoon. At least, he's pretty sure it's from today...

"I'm trying to reach Daniel Jackson," says a woman's voice. Not one he recognizes.

"Speaking," he replies. Damn, Perri's name is spelled wrong on the organization chart: she's going to have words for him.

"Doctor Jackson, my name is Elizabeth Weir."

Daniel blinks as she continues. "--and I work for the Department of--"

"I'm sorry, Elizabeth Weir? The woman who negotiated the last Antarctica treaty? Who got the Kinshasa Accord signed?"

There's a pause, and then a hesitant laugh. "Yes, that's me. I admit I'm a little surprised--"

"That an archaeologist would know who you are." Daniel puts the rest of the cookie down on the desk, forgotten. "I read the news, and I travel a lot. You've done a lot of important things, Doctor Weir."

"Thank you." She pauses. "I have a new project, and I'd like to talk to you about it. Would you have time to meet me in San Francisco this weekend?"

"Ah." Daniel stares blindly at his desk, covered with half-finished survey reports, bound government documents, and three tall stacks of paper he's supposed to have filed four months ago. "I'm not sure _why_ you'd want to talk to me, but yes, I'd be very happy to meet with you this weekend."

They make arrangements to meet at the Hyatt downtown; Daniel's been there before. When he hangs up the phone, he drops into his chair and fires up Google, the proposal forgotten.

 

***

 

Elizabeth Weir looks very much like her newspaper photographs: tall, aristocratic, graceful. Younger than he expected, although he has a copy of her CV in his backpack. She stands to greet him, wearing a dark blue suit over a pale pink knit shirt. Behind her through the restaurant windows Daniel can see the tourists on Market Street, shivering in their shorts. July in San Francisco isn't what they expected.

Daniel isn't dressed for an interview: instead he's wearing jeans and one of his few clean dress shirts under the same leather jacket he's had for six years now. It's a statement of sorts; one he feels obliged to make.

"Doctor Jackson." Weir motions to the seat next to her, rather than the one across.

Daniel accepts her invitation. "Doctor Weir." It's early afternoon and the restaurant is almost empty, but for a few men lingering at the bar.

"I'm very glad to meet you," she says, and he sees from her expression she's entirely sincere. But then she's a diplomat: it's her job to be sincere. "Before we start," she says with an apologetic smile, "I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to sign some papers." She takes a few sheets of densely-written text out of a folder in her briefcase.

"Confidentiality agreement?" Daniel picks up his water glass and takes a sip. He can see the waiter hovering by the bar, waiting for the best moment to get their order.

Weir nods calmly, but with a cant to her head that Daniel suspects means she's impressed. She hands him the forms and a pen; he signs without even reading, scrawling his name across the narrow lines with a flourish.

The waiter swoops in as Daniel hands the papers back, and they spend a few minutes dithering over their orders. She has a glass of pinot grigio and a salad; Daniel opts for a beer and a sandwich. He's not really hungry, but he's not sure how often he'll get the military to pay for his lunch, so he's going to take advantage of it.

"So," Weir says as she hands the menus to the waiter. "I'm going to--"

Daniel interrupts. "Please, let me."

"Excuse me?" She looks taken aback.

He smiles and leans towards her, making her a co-conspirator. "Let me tell you what I think you're going to tell me. It shouldn't take too long. And if I'm completely off-base, you'll let me know right away. Besides, if I'm wrong, you won't want to tell me anything anyway, will you?"

Her frown fights with her curiosity; the curiosity wins, as Daniel hoped it might. "All right, but I'm afraid you'll be wasting your time."

"Thank you." He pauses for a moment and fishes a small, and extremely battered, notebook out of his backpack. It might once have been green, and is held together with a rubber band. "Back in the early 90s," he begins, "the US military, particularly the Air Force, started hiring an unusual groups of specialists. Archaeologists, linguists, curators. And not to maintain or investigate archaeological sites on military lands, because these weren't New World specialists: they were classicists, medievalists, specialists in Paleolithic cultures and obscure, ancient languages. Quite a few Egyptologists came--and went. One of the classicists was Doctor Robert Rothman, who was an assistant of mine during my post-doc."

Weir's eyes widen perceptibly, but she keeps her mask of serene interest in place. If it is a mask; Daniel is having a hard time reading her.

"Around the same time, the military started going out and doing their own research. Digs in Egypt, the Sudan, Norway, Mongolia. Everything's very tightly controlled, but archaeologists aren't stupid, and it's hard to disguise Special Forces commandos as shovel-bums. Lots of money was being spent on some very shaky research designs. Although it was concealed well enough to slide by the host countries, for the most part, I'll grant you. Then there were the removals: _large_ objects being taken out of sites in Egypt, Eritrea, Mexico, shipped to the US, and disappeared."

Their drinks arrived. Daniel takes a sip of his beer: it's pleasantly bitter. "No comment yet, Doctor Weir?"

She purses her lips and sips her wine, then puts it down before shaking her head. "Not yet. Please continue, Doctor Jackson."

"Okay." He takes another drink of beer. "It's probably not evident to anyone else; but I've got something of a reputation for crazy theories, as you know. I see connections, it's what I do. And I noticed when people--smart, talented, ambitious people--stopped publishing papers or showing up at conferences. When more than one moved to, of all places, Colorado Springs. Sure, thriving city, proximity to the mountains, all of that. But Colorado Springs isn't the kind of city that attracts Ivy League humanities professors, Doctor Weir. What Colorado Springs has is lots of conservative politics, the Air Force Academy--and NORAD.

"So we've got military involvement in something odd, and then the archaeologists. And the military, well, they don't care that much about knowledge for knowledge's sake. But they do like technology, particularly weapons.

"I was confused, I admit, when I realized the scope of the hirings. Because after a while it wasn't just social scientists. Hard scientists were disappearing into Colorado as well. Maybe I would have let it go, except--well, let's be serious. You don't hire cosmologists, astrophysicists, aeronautical engineers, and quantum theorists for no reason at all. Not someone like Rodney McKay, who came out of CalTech like a wildfire, promising to rewrite everything we know about quantum physics--and then suddenly stopped publishing about four years ago."

He pauses: it's been a while since he last lectured, and that's what this feels like. Weir's expression has changed: she's leaning forward a little, her hand tapping the foot of her wine glass, which she hasn't touched since that first sip. "You with me so far?" Daniel asks.

"Entirely," she responds. "Please continue."

"You know, it's funny. Within the scientific community, Erich Von Daniken is a joke; his theories about alien intervention in prehistory are considered a thinly-disguised excuse for racist theories about the superiority of European cultures. He's the archaeology community's version of Lamarcke, and nobody takes him seriously.

"But here we have the military, archaeology, and cosmologists. Something hidden in the past that fascinates our high-tech folks who like things that explode. Something involving the structure of the universe. What else could it be, I wondered, than evidence of alien visitations? Maybe even highly-advanced artifacts?

"Maybe Von Daniken was right."

Her eyebrows have both risen high on her forehead. "Doctor--"

He raises a hand. "Please, let me finish. That was as far as I'd gotten before you called. But I had no evidence, nothing concrete, just a theory that seemed to fit. And I've learned my lesson about unsupported hypotheses." His beer is getting warm; he drinks it anyway. "So there I was, with a wackjob theory based on nothing but supposition and a string of bizarre coincidences. A strange story from a couple of porters in a small town in Mexico; the things Robert refused to tell me the last time I saw him; second-hand reports from a cultural anthropologist I met in Nepal.

"But then _you_ called. Doctor Elizabeth Weir, diplomat and linguist. You don't _do_ ancient languages, do you, Doctor Weir? You speak Russian, German, French, and Italian. Your specialty is delicate international negotiations, not dissecting the past for clues about human behavior. They send you to the hot spots, the places where it's vital to find some common ground. You talk to living people, that's what you do. And four months ago you sold your house in Adams Morgan and moved to Colorado Springs.

"So."

He takes a breath and meets her eyes. "They're here, aren't they?"

Her salad looks wilted; his sandwich is untouched. She looks amused, faintly. And just a bit surprised. She must be an excellent negotiator, he thinks. After a long moment, during which Daniel's stomach churns uneasily, she reaches into her briefcase and extracts her cell phone.

"Lieutenant, this is Doctor Weir. I'll be returning this evening, with a guest. Please find transport for us, would you? Yes, we should be there," she glances at her watch, "within the hour if the traffic isn't bad. Fine, thank you."

She slips the cell away and looks across the table at Daniel. There is great humor in her face, and unsurpassed enthusiasm in her eyes; his breath catches. He isn't wrong.

"Did you drive your car in, Doctor Jackson?"

Caught off guard, he boggles. "Uh, yes, why?"

"Good. We can take yours, then." She smiles cheerily and stands up, dropping her napkin next to her untouched salad.

"Where?"

"Travis Air Force Base," she replies, picks up her briefcase, and heads for the door. When he doesn't follow right away, she turns around. "Well? Did you have anything else to do tonight?"

He grabs his backpack and follows, leaving the last two inches of his beer in the glass.

 

***

 

They pull into an underground parking garage not long after sunset Colorado time, Daniel thinks. He's a bit nauseated from the way the Marine driving the car took the frequent curves without slowing even a fraction. Doctor Weir, who insisted during the bumpy flight from California that Daniel call her Elizabeth, leads him briskly through the rows of parked cars to a guarded doorway.

She shows her identification, Daniel shows his, and he is required to sign a log, stand for a photograph, and--he suspects--promise the life of his firstborn in writing. It's all a bit much, but Elizabeth is quivering with excitement, and he allows himself to be towed along in her enthusiastic wake.

They are escorted to an elevator by an armed guard, and go down; at the bottom, they exit, go around a corner, sign yet another log book, pass through what looks like an airlock, and enter another elevator. This one takes them twenty-eight stories down: Daniel's ears pop, and he can't keep from gaping at Elizabeth. She smiles and says nothing.

At the bottom, she thanks the Marine and leads Daniel into a dank industrial corridor, with exposed ductwork and numbers stenciled on the walls and doors. "This way, I think we're here in time."

"Time for what? Elizabeth, I think I've been pretty obliging, all things considered, but --"

She ignores him. He follows her, muttering, down the hall, around a corner, up a flight of stairs, and into ... a conference room.

There's a meeting just breaking up. On a _Saturday night_? About a dozen men and women, most of them in fatigues, are pushing chairs back and standing around chatting in the way that one does at the end of a meeting. Elizabeth pulls Daniel by the sleeve of his jacket through the group to the head of the table.

"Daniel," she says, pausing in front of thin blonde woman in a black tank top. "I'd like you to meet Colonel Carter. Sam, this is Doctor Daniel Jackson. He's here to, ah--" she nods at the window making up most of the wall.

The blonde, who looks tired but friendly, shakes Daniel's hand as she stands. "Good to meet you, Doctor Jackson. Welcome to the program." She closes a folder marked "Top Secret" and tucks it under her arm.

"Well, ah, I'm not exactly--"

"Colonel Carter is an astrophysicist," Elizabeth interjects; Daniel suspects she's cut him off on purpose. "And over there's Rodney McKay," she adds, nodding at a man just leaving the room. "You'll meet him later."

"Lucky you," murmurs Colonel Carter, with a small smile. "Elizabeth, I'd love to chat, but I've got to--"

"No, it's fine, Sam. We'll talk tomorrow."

Carter departs, with a last smile at Daniel. The room is clearing out, but for one man standing with his back to the conference table, looking through the window. "Go on," says Elizabeth, motioning Daniel towards the window. "This is what I brought you to see."

All this way, just to look through a window? Daniel steps up next to the other man and looks out. The window looks down into a large room, maybe a hundred feet in each direction. Daniel leans against the glass and peers upward, but can't see a ceiling, just a shaft rising into dimness above them. But it's not the room that's the most interesting, anyway: in the center of it, propped on a pedestal with a ramp leading down, is an immense ring. Fully twenty feet in diameter, the surface is etched with symbols he's never seen before.

"What is that?" he asks the man standing next to him, another military guy in fatigues, with close-cropped greying hair and a scowl etched across his face like petroglyphs on granite.

In response, he gets an incredulous stare and a sharp bark of laughter. "One of yours, Elizabeth?"

"I'm afraid so," she replies, and comes up to stand next to Daniel. "Colonel O'Neill, Doctor Daniel Jackson. Colonel, is SG-12 still on schedule?"

"Yup." O'Neill has turned back to the window, staring down at the ring as if transfixed.

"Schedule for what?" Daniel asks, as three women and a man, all in full military gear, with packs, helmets, and short ugly guns, file into the room below and arrange themselves at the foot of the ramp. "Let me guess: that's SG-12?"

"Not stupid, is he?" mutters O'Neill; Daniel casts him a sharp glance but O'Neill doesn't look away from the view below.

"No, he's really not, Colonel," answers Elizabeth. "Ah, here we go," she says, when the ring begins to move. Part of the ring, actually: an inner segment, which spins around and then comes to a halt. There's an almost-audible clunk through the window as a triangular clamp slots forward itself above one of the symbols on the inner ring, and a red light comes on. The ring spins again, comes to a halt, is clamped in place, and again.

Daniel realizes O'Neill is counting softly beside him. "Four... five ... six..." At "seven", the ring stops spinning. There's a pause, and then _something_ erupts from the ring, something like water, but not. Something like the very fabric of space is tearing, wrenched out of time and place. The phenomenon emerges about twenty feet from the ring, moving sideways, perpendicular to the alignment of the ring, and then dissipates, spinning back into the ring.

"What the--" Daniel stops. Whatever it is, isn't over. Because now, instead of being able to see to the back of the room through the opening of the ring, he sees a surface of some type. Like water, but not...

As he watches, jaw agape, the four people at the bottom of the ramp settle their packs and walk up the ramp to the ring. Three of them step through the surface calmly, as if entering another room; the last of them pauses to wave at someone out of Daniel's view, below. And then she's gone as well, disappeared behind the swirling blue curtain. Two or three seconds pass, and then the curtain simply disappears, the lit triangles on the ring go dark.

The four people who walked up the ramp just a moment before are nowhere in the room. They are _gone_.

"Holy shit." Daniel stumbles back from the window and drops into a chair. Then he hops up again and races back to the window. "Did that--was that--"

Elizabeth is smiling. O'Neill has turned around, is resting with his back against the window, arms folded. "Thought you said he was smart, Elizabeth."

"Well," she shrugs delicately. "Don't tell me you weren't impressed the first time you saw the gate open, Colonel."

He grunts. "I'm an old man, Doctor; I can't remember that far back."

"Where did they go?" Daniel finally thinks to ask. "Where does that thing take them? How far?"

Elizabeth looks at O'Neill, who scowls. "Don't ask me, I'm not in charge anymore. But I heard they're doing a preliminary sweep of P3X-something. Somewhere in Anubis's old territories. Carter would know for sure."

"Which means?" Daniel looked to Elizabeth for translation.

"Another planet," she says. "The gate makes a wormhole, Daniel, and it goes to other planets. Dozens of them, even hundreds."

Daniel fumbles for the chair again, and eases himself down into it, as if it might disappear underneath him. Four years, he'd been chasing this phantom, mostly for fun, for the riddle of it. Sneaking into secured databases, quizzing drunk Guatemalan peasants, learning more than he ever wanted about conspiracy theorists of every flavor. And yet the reality of it, what was actually _happening..._

"Other planets," he repeats, and then looks up sharply. "And other _people_? Are there other people?"

"Sure there are, Jackson," says O'Neill. "Of course, most of 'em want to kill us. But they're out there."

Daniel frowns, staring at the other man. How can he be so cynical? This is earth-shattering. Aliens! Space travel! "What do you do?" he asks, suddenly.

"Hmm?" O'Neill's mind was far away.

"Do, what do you do. The other colonel, she's an astrophysicist. And you have, oh," he waves a hand, "archaeologists and engineers and other specialists. What do you do, Colonel?"

O'Neill levels a narrow, dark gaze at him, from eyes that are unreflective, hard chips in his hard face. "I kill people."

With that, he nods to Elizabeth and leaves the room, letting the door slam on his way out. Daniel winces.

"Don't worry," says Elizabeth. "You actually did better than most of my new recruits. Colonel O'Neill's pretty hard on the science staff, but we're lucky to have him back."

... recruit?

"Yes," says Daniel, his hands locked on the seat of his chair, as if to hold himself in place.

"What do you mean, yes?" she asks.

"Yes, I'll quit my job and move to Colorado Springs and sign any papers you want and drink bad military coffee and lose all the respect of my peers and--anything. Yes, I'll join up. Just tell me where to sign." He hasn't babbled like that in years; he blushes, but meets her eyes resolutely.

"I never had any doubt." She plucks at his sleeve and leads him from the room. "Anyone who could figure out three-quarters of the program without ever setting foot on Cheyenne Mountain is someone we need on board. I think you'll have a lot to contribute, and I know you'll do things you never expected.

"Welcome to the Stargate Program, Doctor Jackson."


End file.
